A Most Uncommon Degree of Popularity (16 page)

As trendy and with-it a family as I like to think we are, neither of my kids is ADHD, and so we don’t have those medications in the house. Furthermore, most of the various drugs used to treat that disorder are carefully controlled substances. Doctors can’t call in refills. You have to show up at the drugstore, a written prescription in hand.

Sue’s suggestions for getting her son’s pill were absurd. I could go to school—with its unplowed parking lot—and see if someone was there and see if that someone had a key to the nurse’s office and then see if he or she would be willing to violate school policy and federal law and give me Charlie’s Ritalin.

“Or I could meet you at your house,” I said.

“Oh, I’m in a meeting,” she said. “And it
is
Jill’s day, not mine. She has a dose for him in case this happens.”

I asked if there was any way I could get into her house. No, the neighbors who kept her key spent the winter in Florida.

I had to wonder if they were therefore the best people to have charge of one’s key.

“Oh, well, I’m sure he’ll be fine,” she said. “I’m sure of it.”

That she had left this incredibly important meeting to call me suggested she knew perfectly well he was not going to be fine.

I called Annelise, but her younger daughter took Adderall, which was apparently not interchangeable with Ritalin. The family who lives behind Mimi had Stratera, which was again something else. My third call also turned up Adderall, but the mother thought she might have an half-used bottle of Concerta around somewhere and offered to go look for it. But I was growing uneasy about the liability issues involved in playing doctor, so I gave up and did what people must have done with ADHD kids before the days of Ritalin—sent him outside to play with orders not to come in until he was too tired to move. That was fine with my son, but the other kid, Jake, was a whiny number; he was cold, he complained, he was tired. He kept coming in the house to use the bathroom, to get a drink, to track in mud, and I finally let him stay inside, lying on the sofa in the sunroom under a blanket, watching a video.

All of this sent Erin across the street to Mimi’s house where she met up with the other girls. I didn’t see her again until dark.

The snow had extended along
much of the Mid-Atlantic, and I had spoken to Jamie’s parents early in the day. Yes, Pittsburgh was catching the edge of the storm system, but it shouldn’t be bad at all.

The following morning, however, my father-in-law called. Pittsburgh’s slush had frozen overnight, and Jamie’s mother had been in an accident. Another car had slid into hers, forcing it into the car ahead. Her airbag had inflated, and she had been wearing her seat belt, but she had broken her sternum. She was going to be fine, but her recovery was going to be long and, for a while, rather painful.

The kids and I drove up Friday after school. I was prepared to be the perfect daughter-in-law, but the other daughter-in-law and her million Polish relatives had gotten there first. The house was spotless, and the freezer was full of neatly labeled little packages. So there wasn’t much to do. My mother-in-law slept; my father-in-law did guy-type stuff out in his workshop with Thomas and taught Erin how to use a slide rule. “No one ever uses them anymore,” he said, “but the learning is good for you.”

As soon as he heard about his mother, Jamie said he would fly up to Pittsburgh on Saturday, but his dad and I agreed that there wasn’t much point. I tried not to hear the relief in Jamie’s voice.

Sometimes I wondered how much I was missing Jamie. I did miss the Jamie whom I knew and loved, but the fellow who had been coming to our house for the occasional weekend wasn’t him. That individual was a cantankerous bachelor.

Jamie had been finding it hard to come from the pristine order of a hotel room to the normal chaos of a family home. So whenever he was going to be coming home, I spent Friday afternoon frantically tidying up so that our house was within hailing distance of a pristine hotel room, and nothing makes me bitchier than when I am doing something to meet someone else’s standards.

In Houston he had been falling asleep listening to sports talk shows. So when he came to bed at home, he unthinkingly turned on the clock radio to listen to complete idiots yammer about major-league hockey. He found it restful, a way to stop thinking about the trial; I didn’t find it restful, and I wasn’t thinking about the trial in the first place. He’d walk in the room where someone was watching television, pick up the remote, and change the channel. When the kids or I shrieked at him, he blinked, startled at himself, and apologized, but then sat there, obviously unable to relax because he couldn’t channel surf.

What he truly wanted was for all four of us to be sitting quietly in the same room while he channel surfed. If we really did live in a theme park, I could get three automated dummies to sit with him and then the kids and I could go about our business.

•  •  •

Jamie did come home the
following weekend, and I brought up Blair’s party with him since Blair had not stopped bringing it up with me. “Bruce’s parents really do want to meet him,” she had said over and over.

“If you are home next weekend,” I said to him, “will you come?”

“I am not going to want to,” he said, not very apologetically. “Either people are going to insist on talking about the trial, which I do not want to talk about, or the whole conversation will be about the carpool line.”

The second half of that was true. It’s easy for group conversation to find the lowest common denominator, the easiest thing to talk about, and in our case, at least for the women, that’s the kids—the school and the carpool line and the teachers. And although the men do love their own children and even feel considerable concern for their kids’ little friends, they aren’t interested in talking about who is getting which lane on the swim team. At the end of some evenings I’m embarrassed at how trivial and boring the conversation has been.

When we moms are talking about the Spring Fair or the cotton-fleece drawstring skirts, we’re talking shop. In some ways it isn’t any different from when the men talk about how their firms are billing. We are talking about our jobs, too. The difference is that we don’t acknowledge it as shoptalk; we think that any discussion of children’s issues must be universally interesting … and it’s not.

I suppose that that’s how we differ from the fifties’ moms, the June Cleavers. They didn’t come to parties expecting to talk about what they cared about. They were there to be pretty and to listen to the men. We, on the other hand, would never dream of silencing ourselves in favor of the men.

Jamie did make it home
for the Presidents’ Day weekend. He got in very late on Friday night, and when I asked him Saturday morning if he was planning on going to Blair’s party, he said no. He hadn’t come home to go to a party.

“We don’t have to stay long. Won’t you please come?”

He had the sports section of the paper spread out on the kitchen table. Ever since the trial started, he had been following college-basketball statistics obsessively. He turned a page. “Nope.” He was keeping his voice even and pleasant.

All day long I kept hoping that he would change his mind. Wasn’t it enough that I wanted him to go? Couldn’t he do this for me?

At six-thirty he was sitting on the floor of the sunroom, his back against the sofa, shuffling cards at the big square coffee table. Erin was in the kitchen, putting a bag of popcorn in the microwave, and Thomas was sprawled halfway across the coffee table, resting on his elbows, watching his father shuffle the cards. “Will you tell Erin that she can’t keep track of the eights?”

“I will not,” Jamie replied evenly. Clearly they were settling in for an evening of Crazy Eights, a game at which Erin had long since revealed herself to be a vicious card counter. “Why don’t you keep track of them yourself?”

Jamie was clearly not going anywhere. I sat down.

He shuffled the cards again, then looked at me. He knew exactly what I was thinking. “Why do you care so much?”

I paused. I didn’t understand Bruce’s career or this merger. I had no special relationship with his parents. There was nothing about this evening that I was looking forward to.

But it was a test. Blair had made it into a test, and one thing I’ve always been good at is tests. “Are you not going just because you think my priorities are out of whack?”

“That’s probably part of it, but I also don’t want to go.”

I guess there wasn’t anything else to say. I stood up.

“It doesn’t sound as if you want to go either,” he said. “Why don’t you stay home, too? We’ll deal you in the game. It will just be the four of us. Erin will beat the pants off of us, but you can view it as an opportunity to teach the kids how to be gracious losers.”

It was tempting. God knows the last thing on earth I wanted to do right now was go upstairs and doll myself up in the world’s most boring outfit—a long black velvet skirt with a black velvet shell and a black velvet blazer. It would be fun to stay home, having popcorn and playing cards with the three people I loved the most. This wasn’t a theme-park moment. This was real; this was family.

But I couldn’t blow off Blair’s party. I couldn’t not show up. It was bad enough that Jamie wasn’t going. I might as well paint a sign and put it on the front walk: “The Meadows family does not value Blair Branson’s party.”

Once again here we all were, back in middle school. So I stood up and went upstairs for my rendezvous with black velvet. I do not look good in black.

The snow of two weeks ago had long since melted, and the pavement was dry as I walked from my car to Blair’s in my thin-soled party shoes.

Blair and Bruce were at the door. Bruce greeted me heartily, but Blair looked over my shoulder. “Jamie didn’t come?”

“I’m
so
sorry.” And over her shoulder I could see that the furniture had been taken out of her Tiffany-blue living room and was replaced by rounded ivory-draped tables with centerpieces, silverware, wineglasses, and place cards.

I had told her. Countless times I had said, “If this is sit-down, if there are place cards, then don’t count on him,” and every single time she had said, “I don’t need an answer yet.” I was angry; I felt as if she had set me up.

I turned my wrap over to the catering staff and went to find Bruce’s parents. They recognized me immediately.

“We’re at your table!” Mrs. Branson exclaimed. “We can’t wait to meet your husband. We’ve told everyone at home.”

“Then I’m so sorry,” I said. “He isn’t going to be able to join us tonight.”

Isn’t going to be able to join us.
That isn’t me. I don’t talk like that. I’m straightforward; I’m impulsive. I explain and explain and explain. Apparently I am going to have to become a different person if I continue being related to popular people.

Bruce’s parents were looking at me expectantly, waiting for me to say more. Mr. Branson finally spoke. “You tell him that we think he is doing a great job.”

“It’s hard to know who to root for,” Mrs. Branson said. “I mean, we went in thinking that these were such bad guys, but I don’t know … that prosecutor gal, I don’t like her.”

That was exactly why Jamie hadn’t wanted to come tonight. He hated that in this trial personalities were mattering so much. The likability of “that prosecutor gal” was irrelevant to the cause of justice, but it was not irrelevant to the verdict. Jamie was consciously exploiting people’s dislike of her abrasive, shrill persona. And he was not proud of it.

He was not the only no-show. I saw Blair discreetly ease into the dining room to rearrange a few place cards and direct one of the waiters to remove some place settings. Annelise went to help her. I didn’t think I would be welcome. Annelise was wearing a fitted sheath of a glowing bottle-green Dupioni silk. She looked very good in it, which meant, of course, that I, too, would have looked very good in it or at least better than I did in black.

I felt frumpy.

Why hadn’t I gotten my hair cut? Or had my nails done or something?

I looked around. Should I make an effort to introduce myself to Bruce’s colleagues or should I join one of the familiar carpool-line conversations?

The bar was set up in the dining room so I went in there. Blair had had the room painted apricot, and her window treatments were wonderful—gloriously simple waterfalls of shimmering apricot silk. The room was crowded, but as I moved in, someone stepped aside, and I saw—to my surprise—silhouetted against the glowing apricot, dressed in a perfectly cut black dinner jacket, Chris Goddard.

I hadn’t known that Blair was inviting him. Now that I thought about it, I realized that I knew very little about this party; normally Blair and I would have discussed the menu, the centerpieces, the guest list, everything. This time we had only talked about Jamie.

I started toward Chris, then stopped when I realized that he was talking to someone else I hadn’t known Blair was inviting—Mary Paige Caudwell.

Why had Blair invited her? Mary Paige might have wanted to get her daughter included in our daughters’ crowd, but she had—thank God—shown no interest in being friends with us. Our daughters might be cool, but we weren’t.

I had no interest in being friends with her, either, so I started to make my way to the bar, which was on the far side of the room. Mimi’s husband, Ben, was there, and when he turned, he spotted me.

He lifted the glass of wine that he was probably getting for Mimi, and since there were too many people for him to call across the room, he pointed to the glass, inquiring if I wanted one. I nodded a yes, and as I waited for him, I glanced back at Chris and Mary Paige.

When I had first seen them, they had both been standing in front of the silk drapes. I was sure of it; that was the kind of detail I noticed. Now Chris was silhouetted against the wall. Although the wall and the curtain were the same color, the wall had less sheen. It held on to the light instead of reflecting it back as the silk did.

But the distance between Chris and Mary Paige was the same—another detail a photographer is not going to be wrong about. I guessed that Mary Paige had moved forward, and Chris had stepped back. Still waiting for Ben and my wine, I continued to watch them. Yes, Mary Paige eased herself forward, and as if they were a little physics experiment, Chris moved himself back.